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LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance
Standard Intro
The following section will be at the top of all posts in the LW Women series.
About two months ago, I put out a call for anonymous submissions by the women on LW, with the idea that I would compile them into some kind of post. There is a LOT of material, so I am breaking them down into more manageable-sized themed posts.
Seven women submitted, totaling about 18 pages.
Crocker's Warning- Submitters were told to not hold back for politeness. You are allowed to disagree, but these are candid comments; if you consider candidness impolite, I suggest you not read this post
To the submittrs- If you would like to respond anonymously to a comment (for example if there is a comment questioning something in your post, and you want to clarify), you can PM your message and I will post it for you. If this happens a lot, I might create a LW_Women sockpuppet account for the submitters to share.
Standard Disclaimer- Women have many different viewpoints, and just because I am acting as an intermediary to allow for anonymous communication does NOT mean that I agree with everything that will be posted in this series. (It would be rather impossible to, since there are some posts arguing opposite sides!)
Please do NOT break anonymity, because it lowers the anonymity of the rest of the submitters.
Minimizing the Inferential Distance
One problem that I think exists in discussions about gender issues between men and women, is that the inferential distance is much greater than either group realizes. Women might assume that men know what experiences women might face, and so not explicitly mention specific examples. Men might assume they know what the women are talking about, but have never really heard specific examples. Or they might assume that these types of things only happened in the past, or not to the types of females in their in-group
So for the first post in this series, I thought it would be worthwhile to try to lower this inferential distance, by sharing specific examples of what it's like as a smart/geeky female. When submitters didn't know what to write, I directed them to this article, by Julia Wise (copied below), and told them to write their own stories. These are not related to LW culture specifically, but rather meant to explain where the women here are coming from. Warning: This article is a collection of anecdotes, NOT a logical argument. If you are not interested in anecdotes, don't read it.
Copied from the original article (by a woman on LW) on Radiant Things:
It's lunchtime in fourth grade. I am explaining to Leslie, who has no friends but me, why we should stick together. “We're both rejects,” I tell her. She draws back, affronted. “We're not rejects!” she says. I'm puzzled. It hadn't occurred to me that she wanted to be normal.
…................
It's the first week of eighth grade. In a lesson on prehistory, the teacher is trying and failing to pronounce “Australopithecus.” I blurt out the correct pronunciation (which my father taught me in early childhood because he thought it was fun to say). The boy next to me gives me a glare and begins looking for alliterative insults. “Fruity female” is the best he can manage. “Geek girl” seems more apt, but I don't suggest it.
…..................
It's lunchtime in seventh grade. I'm sitting next to my two best friends, Bridget and Christine, on one side of a cafeteria table. We have been obsessed with Star Wars for a year now, and the school's two male Star Wars fans are seated opposite us. Under Greyson's leadership, we are making up roleplaying characters. I begin describing my character, a space-traveling musician named Anya. “Why are your characters always girls?” Grayson complains. “Just because you're girls doesn't mean your characters have to be.”
“Your characters are always boys,” we retort. He's right, though – female characters are an anomaly in the Star Wars universe. George Lucas (a boy) populated his trilogy with 97% male characters.
…................
It's Bridget's thirteenth birthday, and four of us are spending the night at her house. While her parents sleep, we are roleplaying that we have been captured by Imperials and are escaping a detention cell. This is not papers-and-dice roleplaying, but advanced make-believe with lots of pretend blaster battles and dodging behind furniture.
Christine and Cass, aspiring writers, use roleplaying as a way to test out plots in which they make daring raids and die nobly. Bridget, a future lawyer, and I, a future social worker, use it as a way to test out moral principles. Bridget has been trying to persuade us that the Empire is a legitimate government and we shouldn't be trying to overthrow it at all. I've been trying to persuade Amy that shooting stormtroopers is wrong. They are having none of it.
We all like daring escapes, though, so we do plenty of that.
…...............
It's two weeks after the Columbine shootings, and the local paper has run an editorial denouncing parents who raise "geeks and goths." I write my first-ever letter to the editor, defending geeks as kids parents should be proud of. A girl sidles up to me at the lunch table. "I really liked your letter in the paper," she mutters, and skitters away.
................
It's tenth grade, and I can't bring myself to tell the president of the chess club how desperately I love him. One day I go to chess club just to be near him. There is only one other girl there, and she's really good at chess. I'm not, and I spend the meeting leaning silently on a wall because I can't stand to lose to a boy. Anyway, I despise the girls who join robotics club to be near boys they like, and I don't want to be one of them.
................
It's eleventh grade, and we are gathered after school to play Dungeons and Dragons. (My father, who originally forbid me to play D&D because he had heard it would lead us to hack each other to pieces with axes, has relented.) Christine is Dungeonmaster, and she has recruited two feckless boys to play with us. One of them is in love with her.
(Nugent points out that D&D is essentially combat reworked for physically awkward people, a way of reducing battle to dice rolls and calculations. Christine has been trained by her uncle in the typical swords-and-sorcery style of play, but when she and I play the culture is different. All our adventures feature pauses for our characters to make tea and omelets.)
On this afternoon, our characters are venturing into the countryside and come across two emaciated farmers who tell us their fields are unplowed because dark elves from the forest keep attacking them. “They're going to starve if they don't get a crop in the ground,” I declare. “We've got to plow at least one field.” The boys go along with this plan.
“The farmers tell you their plow has rusted and doesn't work,” the Dungeonmaster informs us from behind her screen.
I persist. “There's got to be something we can use. I look around to see if there's anything else pointy I can use as a plow.”
The Dungeonmaster considers. “There's a metal gate,” she decides.
“Okay, I rig up some kind of harness and hitch it to the pony.”
“It's rusty too,” intones the Dungeonmaster, “and pieces of it keep breaking off. Look, you're not supposed to be farming. You're supposed to go into the forest and find the dark elves. I don't have anything else about the farmers. The elves are the adventure.” Reluctantly, I give up my agricultural rescue plan and we go into the forest to hack at elves.
…............................
I'm 25 and Jeff's sister's boyfriend is complaining that he never gets to play Magic: the Gathering because he doesn't know anyone who plays. “You could play with Julia,” Jeff suggests.
“Very funny,” says Danner, rolling his eyes.
Jeff and I look at each other. I realize geeks no longer read me as a geek. I still love ideas, love alternate imaginings of how life could be, love being right, but now I care about seeming normal.
“...I wasn't joking,” Jeff says.
“It's okay,” I reassure Danner. “I used to play every day, but I've pretty much forgotten how.”
…............................
A's Submission
My creepy/danger alert was much higher at a meeting with a high-status (read: supposedly utility-generating, which includes attractive in the sense of pleasing or exciting to look at, but mostly the utility is supposed to be from actions, like work or play) man who was supposed to be my boss for an internship.
The way he talked about the previous intern, a female, the sleazy way he looked while reminiscing and then had to smoke a cigarette, while in a meeting with me, my father (an employer who was abusive), and the internship program director, plus the fact that when I was walking towards the meeting room, the employees of the company, all men, stared at me and remarked, “It’s a girl,” well, I became so creeped out that I didn’t want to go back. It was hard, as a less articulate 16 year-old, to explain to the internship director all that stuff without sounding irrational. But not being able to explain my brain’s priors (incl. abuses that it had previously been too naïve/ignorant to warn against and prevent) wasn’t going to change them or decrease the avoidance-inducing fear and anxiety.
So after some awkward attempts to answer the internship director’s question of why I didn’t want to work there, I asked for a placement with a different company, which she couldn’t do, unfortunately.
B's Submission
Words from my father’s mouth, growing up: “You *need* to be able to cook and keep a clean house, or what man would want to marry you?”
…................
Sixth grade year, I had absolutely no friends whatsoever. A boy I had a bit of a crush on asked me out on a dare. I told him “no,” and he walked back to his laughing friends.
…................
In college I joined the local SCA (medieval) group, and took up heavy weapons combat. The local (almost all-male) “stick jocks” were very supportive and happy to help. Many had even read “The Armored Rose” and so knew about female-specific issues and how to adapt what they were teaching to deal with things like a lower center of gravity, less muscle mass, a different grip, and ingrained cultural hang-ups. The guys were great. But there was one problem: There was no female-sized loaner armor.
See, armor is an expensive investment for a new hobby, and so local groups provide loaner armor for newbies, which generally consist of hand-me-downs from the more experienced fighters. We had a decent amount of new female fighters in our college groups, but without a pre-existing generation of female fighters (women hadn’t even been allowed to fight until the 80s) there wasn’t anything to hand down.
The only scar I ever got from heavy combat was armor bite from wearing much-too-large loaner armor. I eventually got my own kit, and (Happy Ending) the upcoming generation of our group always made sure to acquire loaner armor for BOTH genders.
…................
Because of a lack of options, and not really having anywhere else to go, I moved in with my boyfriend and got married at a rather young age (20 and 22, respectively). I had no clue how to be independent. One of the most empowering things I ever did was starting work as an exotic dancer. After years of thinking that I couldn't support myself, it gave me the confidence that I could leave an unhappy marriage without ending up on the street (or more likely, mooching off friends and relatives). Another Happy Ending- Now I'm completely independent.
…................
Walking into the library. A man holds open the door for me. I smile and thank him as I walk through. He makes a sexual comment. I do the Look-Straight-Ahead-and-Walk-Quickly thing.
“Bitch,” he spits out.
It’s not the first of this kind of interaction in my life, and it most certainly won’t be the last (almost any time you are in an urban environment, without a male). But it hit harder than most because I had been expecting a polite interaction.
Relevant link: http://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/why-men-catcall/
…................
The next post will be on Group Attribution Error, and will come out when I get around to it. :P
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Comments (1254)
Being male, I never had any visibility into experiences like these until I first began reading anecdotes like this online, and then started talking with women I knew about how things were for them. So thanks for taking the effort to put this together.
This should be taught in schools.
It is - obscurely, and too late, and to those who already know.
It's called Women's Studies (though it's about more that women's experiences).
And people (for whom the inferential distance is too great) love to hate on it.
I don't think that's all that's going on here. A lot of Women's Studies has other ideas and claims which are much more questionable, and the good points (such as the substantial differences in women's experience v. men) can get easily lost in the noise.
I read an introduction to women's studies textbook and it was all inside baseball commentary. It was not like reading this. At all. It was a survey of all the different fields that Women's Studies engages with, but it did not teach this, it assumed it. This is consistent with some male acquaintances experience of some such courses as hostile to them. Also, Hugo Schwyzer is a dick.
I've made a number of comments on this post that were addressing specific, somewhat-tangential issues, and though I think those are important too, I just want to echo cata here:
Thank you for this post, daenerys, and for collecting these anecdotes. I think it's quite valuable and look forward to subsequent posts in the series.
That's quite eye-opening, thank you!
That's not how Crocker's Rules work; they're supposed to be declared by the listener, who thereby takes responsibility for any hurt feelings caused by the content. You can't declare Crocker's rules on behalf of others.
That's why I called it Crocker's Warning and not Crocker's Rules. I am implying that by reading the content you are agreeing to Crocker's Rules. It's just a way of saying that the submitters were told not to hold back, and if you want it sugar-coated, you shouldn't read it.
Neat, can I put one of those on my comments feed?
"You can speak to me candidly and I won't throw a fit" is a concession. "I'm about to speak candidly" is a warning. "I'm about to speak candidly, and that might upset you, but you have to be nice when you respond anyway, and if you're not going to be nice, then I don't want to play with you" is an ultimatum. "I'm about to speak candidly, so you're going to agree to not throw a fit" is an ultimatum with extra squick factor.
You might want to try reading what I actually wrote, instead of putting words in my mouth.
What you think I said:
These are not at all what I said. Your own definition of a warning ("I'm about to speak candidly') is pretty much exactly what I said (with the addendum that I added in the grandparent "so if you don't want to hear candidness, don't read it.")
So let's look exactly at what I said:
Notice how I DON'T AT ALL say the types of ultimatums you seem to think I said.
I am tapping out of the Crocker's Warning discussion, because I feel like it has fallen to logical rudeness
I thought that my last examples were, respectively, a fair paraphrasing of social consequences for not respecting the warning and a fair desugaring of your original statment when "Crocker's rules" is tabooed. However, this is not the first time I have been accused of putting words into others' mouths, so I will provisionally accept that I have acted rudely.
I am sorry that I misrepresented your position, and misrepresented it to your disadvantage. My prior comment is retracted.
I think the confusion comes from your use of the phrase "Crocker's Rules" in the explanation (the word "Crocker" shows up twice; I'm referring to the second time). If what you meant was "these are candid comments; if you consider candidness impolite, I suggest you not read this post," then you should have just said that.
As it is, the warning seems incoherent, because you refer to a known concept (Crocker's Rules) incorrectly. When I first read it, the impression I got was that we could respond to the anonymous anecdotes without any consideration for politeness, which seemed really bizarre.
It was especially bizarre because, for this post at least, there doesn't seem to be anything about LW in particular. There's just a reasonable explanation of inferential distance and anecdotes about people being mistreated in their day to day lives to lower that distance.
Thank you. I think that this comment is the most constructive criticism on the topic, and have edited my post to include your wording.
You're welcome! Glad I could help.
Suppose a hypothetical LW user wanted to say something very racist, or bigoted against some other group.Would it suffice for her to avoid censure for her to preface her comments with such a warning?
Suppose someone posted a comment that implied kicking puppies was good. Responses that only made that premise explicit would be unhelpful and probably hostile. Daenerys' warning might be sufficient to ward of those responses. But substantive engagement with the argument - including criticism - would be welcome and normal in this community.
Upon consideration, I think I have pinpointed what bothers me about the bit in the post about Crocker's Rules. It's the imposition on the reader, not just of potentially offensive content, but also of a waiver of the right to object to the content as being offensive.
That is, I don't object to this part:
Fine and well. A good warning.
But this part seems to suggest that by reading this, I'm waiving my right to say, e.g., "Wait a bit, this isn't just impolite, this is offensive! This reads like an insult!" It seems like the warning is saying: "If you find this offensive, too bad. By reading this, you're agreeing to shut up and take it" — and I don't think that prefacing your post with that is conducive to good discussion, not at all.
Note: I don't actually think any of the anecdotes in this post are offensive.
Me neither. I think the post needs a more specific set of ground rules, something like "the anonymous submitters are putting themselves out on the line here, and in order to have the most honest and useful discussion, they were told not to hold back for politeness...but they'll probably be reading all your comments and replies, so in order to encourage future honest and useful discussions, please don't respond angrily or rudely, since that will discourage submitters in the future from being honest." Which isn't quite in the spirit of Crocker's Rules. (I don't know if 'Crocker's Warning' is a concept that has actually been elaborated...is it?)
These ground rules seem reasonable.
In general when people say "I want to tell you something, but you have to promise not to get angry/offended/etc.", my response is along the lines of:
"I can't and won't promise that. I do promise that I will make an effort to temper any knee-jerk reaction I might have, and to give thought to your words and to my response before I say anything. I try to do this in all of my interactions with people whom I respect, but in this case I promise to make a special effort."
And if that's not good enough... well, then it seems my interlocutor doesn't care that much about telling me whatever it is they wish to tell me.
I think the concept is that content is included from trusting volunteers who were told to expect Crocker's Rules in the audience, and if you're not willing to abide by that trust, you shouldn't read.
If true, that (telling the volunteers to expect Crocker's Rules in the audience) seems at worst disingenuous and at best unwarranted. Taken literally, it translates to:
"I promise that the audience which will read your writings will consist entirely of people who don't get offended by anything you say, up to and including things almost universally considered to be directly and personally insulting." (Because that's what Crocker's Rules are, yes?)
And in general I don't think that "I have things to say, but I'm only going to say them to people who promise not to be offended by anything I say" is in the spirit of Crocker's Rules. I also don't think that it's a good attitude to take, period.
ETA (from http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Crocker's_rules):
So it sounds like the content can't be posted under Crocker's rules, because it's unreasonable to unilaterally exempt oneself from all ordinary social norms of politeness, even when people (sort of) have the option not to read; and the content can't be posted not under Crocker's rules, because the authors were promised that if it were posted, it would be under Crocker's rules. Maybe that means that if we're serious about upholding norms, it means daenerys has torpedoed her own project by making a promise she couldn't keep.
Some of these anecdotes really illustrate the loss suffered when a group is insufficiently diverse. This one in particular struck me as a demonstration of the high value of a range of perspectives:
All too often, people focus on how gender discrimination is unfair to those who are excluded or minimized, but it's also a loss to the group and its goals as a whole.
This story struck me more as an indication of a really bad DM than anything gender related. If I were running a campaign where players stopped to try to actually help plow, I'd be really happy with them. Of course, in my own campaign world, I've also set up a complicated tea culture with some of the high noble families trying to out-do each other by finding expensive teas from exotic locales to show off. So I may not be very representative.
(In which I solve the wrong problem)
"Obviously", you have the dark elves attack the farm while the adventurers are trying to help get the field plowed. ;)
Yes and no. It could also be a sign of a broken group- If two of the people love killing dark elves and hate farming, and two of the people love farming and like killing dark elves, the group should be killing dark elves, or there should be two groups, one which farms, while the other one kills dark elves.
I also didn't get the gender-related feeling; one of my wizards got called "Angseth from Accounting" because he kept the party records, treasury, and was constantly trying to buy / found businesses and do other economic things, rather than just murdering for fun and profit.
Yeah, a creative DM might treat this as an opportunity for a campaign in which the players are more involved, as opposed to a railroaded dungeon crawl. But that demands a good deal of preparation or improvisation skills.
In that situation I'd probably have the farmers tell the players that the harvest is doomed because the Harvest Goddess is displeased with the Dark Elves' Unholy Rituals, and will not bless the land - a situations the players can solve by either kicking Dark Elf ass as originally planned, or by having the group's Cleric bless the lands, or by doing something to please the Harvest Goddess (organize a great feast, bake a legendary apple pie, find the rare Papilla Gourd that grows deep in the forest), or even having the farmers convert to the Dark Elves' Nature Goddess who will bless the crops (for a small price).
Plow one of their fields, and you might feed some of them for some time (if they can get some more farming done in between attacks). Kill their dark elves, and they can feed themselves just fine.
I'd call that reasoning the epitome of shortsightedness; but the DM should've been more flexible and let you plow their field and later contrive a way for your party to learn that the crop failed anyway and everyone was killed or enslaved or starved to death.
The plan was to sow one field and then kill the dark elves, as far as I can tell. I agree that it would not have been a good idea to just plow their field, since obviously that was what had already not been working, but it also seems to me like a very perceptive insight to realize that even if the elves were killed, the already-emaciated farmers might still die without help on the farm. It's also an insight that appears, within the story, to have derived from the presence of an alternative viewpoint.
Why would plowing one field make a difference to their survival or death? Especially when plowing one field is taking up time to the detriment of going after the dark elves. Indeed, if they cared about the farmers, wouldn't a cash transfer make infinitely more sense? No, this looks like the usual signaling about caring: "but they care so much, they even went and plowed a field to help them out!" (As opposed to working on the real problem, or giving them a gold coin which is probably worth several fields of food given the medieval setting and also doesn't have the minor problem of it likely failing anyway since it's going to be plowed by complete amateurs with broken equipment at the wrong time...)
This does seem to start falling pretty heavily into something very close to the MST3K mantra with the note that this was a highschool game.
And given my above suggestion, I'm going to refrain from ranting about how little sense D&D economics make other than to note that adventuring parties seem to be one of the strongest argument in favor of fiat currency ever.
If someone wants to say 'this is a great insight which demonstrates the value of diverse viewpoints!', it'd better be a great insight, and not one that fails multiple ways.
Well, how much would killing the dark elves have helped either? In the context we have two proposed solutions, neither of which really actually does much. One of the solutions is arguably obvious to the traditional male gamer, and the other (which makes about as much or as little sense) does seem to show some degree of diverse viewpoint arguably (although as I commented above, I don't think this one is really gendered related as much as it is to bad DMing).
It is specified the dark elves are the entire problem. The crops are now not being planted or tended because the dark elves are raiding and there weren't raids before. I uh can't see how killing them would not help.
If the farmers already are emaciated they aren't going to be able to survive that long even if they do plow and plant (it takes a long time). Moreover, plowing takes a lot of effort. The most likely result if they do kill the dark elves in a marginally realistic situation is that the farmers will still starve. The whole situation is poorly thought out (and becomes even more poorly thought out as the DM claims that the farmers don't even have functioning farm equipment and thus that the dark elves aren't the only problem).
I can't testify as to the actual value of the planting or whether or not this was necessarily the best plan. There are probably many more plans that would be better, including giving them a gold coin. Or perhaps the farmers in the magical world of dark elves who make armed sorties against impoverished serfs could have been better served by a political upheaval and the installation of democracy. Or maybe because the farmers plant only the magical dubbleboo bean, they would have been able to reap a harvest only if they planted before the next evening's full moon.
There are all kinds of factors or problems that might have complicated the additional idea of plowing the field, and we shouldn't forget that this is a bunch of teenagers, so it's probably not whether this idea was really the optimal emaciated-farmer-assistance program. But instead of exploring these and determining what was the best option, the entire avenue of helping the farmers in a domestic sense was blocked off. It was a set of ideas that was unknown and unwelcome, even though it might actually have been interesting to solve that problem, as well.
Yes, these eleventh-graders might not have been practicing an ideal form of aid, and if they had read some literature on rationality and gone to an agricultural program they might not have thought that plowing one field was the best decision. The point, though, is that the narrowness of focus in the adventure precluded exploration of a large set of options. It's not the perfect parable of how value can be found in diverse opinions, because that perfect parable would have the eleventh-grade girl whip out a well-researched proposal on farm aid. But I do think it helps illuminate the problem.
I don't see how this story has anything to do with gender discrimination, unless it's trying to reinforce some stereotype of "Women can come up with peaceful solutions to problems, but men always resort to violence immediately."
It's not just a stereotype, it's the (exaggerated) truth. For example, in polls about whether citizens approve of whatever war is happening that decade, men are generally more in favor of the war than women.
EDIT: Changed "not a stereotype" to "not just a stereotype".
I assume that just like the DM in the story, those polls also don't allow people to choose a "let's plow their fields" option. Although in some situations it could actually be a very good choice.
I don't think "it's the exaggerated truth" is necessarily an excuse to perpetuate stereotypes.
For example, suppose the writer was a white person who played games with a black dungeon master, who had himself previously played mostly with other black people. One game, the writer tries to solve a problem through negotiation when the DM had planned things so that you were supposed to shoot the bad guys. The writer phrases this not as "The DM had failed to plan for this contingency" but instead as "This is why it's hard to be a white person trying to hang out around black people; they just try to solve every problem by shooting at it and don't accept that we white people might think differently than that."
When someone notices this is perpetuating a stereotype, I don't think it would remove the problem to say "No, seriously, black people are involved in a disproportionate number of shootings", even if this were true. The point isn't that every group is demographically exactly the same, it's that we are trying to avoid creating a climate where we immediately and unreflectingly associate certain groups with the worst characteristics they contingently hold in our current society.
I admit that I am holding this post to a higher standard than I would hold other posts, because it is itself a post about social justice. This might sound like I'm being deliberately annoying and trying to say "gotcha!", but it's not just that.
It's more of a sense of fair play and reciprocity, that the would-be social justice crusader understands that watching your speech to avoid stereotypes is kind of difficult and contrary to usual habits of thought, maybe not the hardest thing in the world, but also not so drop-dead simple that you can immediately assume any failure is due to evil intentions. And so they make a good-faith effort to show that they're going to try to be respectful to your group, even if your group doesn't desperately need the respect. It just makes you feel like they're working with you instead just being someone who yells at you. Like there's a dialogue going on where both sides follow rules when talking to one another, instead of "Shut up and listen why I tell you why you're offensive and how you're going to stop."
I totally admit that as a male I'm not too worried that the stereotype of men as thoughtlessly violent is going to have huge effects on my life, and I'm not seriously offended. But it's like...more like how workers get upset when company executives give themselves huge bonuses, then cut worker pay because the company is under financial pressure. And then say that if the workers worry about the pay cuts they're "not team players". The executives might be right when they say financial pressures necessitate pay cuts for workers. They might even be right that giving themselves large bonuses makes a negligible impact on the company's bottom line. It just seems like a potentially disrespectful gesture.
The socialization of children into gender roles of conciliation and confrontation begins very early, as can be seen in a study by Clearfield and Nelson. Accordingly, it is not surprising (and jibes with our common sense) to note that men and women tend to respond to challenges in different ways. I think it's probably too broad to say that men "always" resort to violence "immediately," which seems like a deliberately weak phrasing. Rather, I'd say that men and women find different solutions, because of their different perspectives.
Yes, I agree that contingently there is statistically more aggression in men. I don't think that's the point; see my response to Miley.
From AlexanderD's comment:
"The point, though, is that the narrowness of focus in the adventure precluded exploration of a large set of options."
If playing D&D with a bunch of girls consistently leads to solutions being proposed that do not fit the traditional D&D mold, that can teach us something about how well that mold fits a bunch of girls. More generally, the author is a pretty smart woman who thought this was a good example - you'd do well to take a second look.
Some of those don't sound terribly gender-specific to me -- but then again, I've had a less stereotypically masculine life than typical. (In particular, I answered Yes to plenty of these questions (the ones in black) --probably more Yes than No, though most were N/A or "What the hell is wrong with you"-- in spite of being male.)
Recommend putting this sentence in bold.
Good idea. Done!
From the final hyperlinked article:
I've never understood this, either. Any good guesses?
Six options:
1) Low rate of success is coupled with a very low investment level. 2) The behavior isn't to try to pick up the woman at all but rather to engage in shared bonding among the males. (Note how this behavior seems to generally occur when there is a group of males.) 3) Lack of self-restraint. The people in question who do this are typically low status and low income. There's a large body of evidence that people with lack of self-control have less life success. (The marshmallow studies and all that.) Some of these people may have little self-control or bother so little to exercise self-control that clearly unsuccessful behavior is still attempted. 4) Attempts to harass the people in question, possibly to blow off steam at one's own lack of sexual success. 5) A well-meaning attempt to actually complement people for being good looking and well-dressed. They may just be unaware of how uncomfortable this behavior often makes women feel. 6) Possibly combining with any combination of the above possibilities- cultural behavior. Once there's some small fraction doing something, how long does it take before the same behavior is imitated in the general group?
Take those with a grain of salt.
There's plenty of evidence (e.g.) of higher-income people engaging in similar behavior.
Yes. The take-away point is that the children's patience with marshmallow promises and their long-term life success may be correlated because they're mutually determined by whether adults and peers in their life are trustworthy and reliable, more so than by a variable of Intrinsic Self-Discipline.
Seems obvious to me: it's fun. People enjoy teasing and flirting, and catcalling is both. The main reason people avoid both of those behaviors is the risk of rejection/social punishment. Catcalling is overwhelmingly done to strangers, unlike most types of flirting, you don't lose face if rejected. Catcalling as teasing is also low-risk, since you aren't offending someone you know, possibly making new enemies. There's a reason catcalling is usually done by guys on public streets, somewhat isolated from their targets. At my college, guys like to sit in their dorm windows (3rd floor or higher) in groups and yell stuff like "HEY CUTIE I LIKE UR BOOBS." Girls occasionally yell stuff back, which the guys seem to love.
It's rather obnoxious of guys at your college to misspell "your" even while talking.
It's actually plausible that they pronounce it "ər" instead of "jɔr," given the amount of internet-related slang that has made it into the speech of the youth.
I guess we could understand catcalling better by seeing its equivalent in more primitive societies, or preferably at apes. Or perhaps by putting a hidden camera on a person who does it frequently, and examining the consequences.
My guesses:
1) Some women react positively to catcalling. Even if one in a hundred, then it would be enough, because the cost is low. As an analogy, receiving spam is also annoying, but a tiny fraction of humans react by sending their money, which rewards the spammers.
2) Catcalling may be a defection in a Prisonners' Dilemma of a group of men meeting a woman. A more polite group would be more likely to impress her positively. But even in the best case scenario, she would most likely choose only one of them as her sexual partner. By catcalling, a man positions himself as a "speaker" of the group, as the dominant male. He slightly increases his personal chance by decreasing the chances of the group as a whole.
3) In its most primitive form, catcalling could be an encouragement to a group rape. It is not a signal for the woman. It is a signal for the fellow men to join the action.
Note that the catcallers only need to believe that it's worthwhile; it needn't actually be.
Additional hypothesis-- for some people, being disliked is preferred to being ignored.
This feels like Main material, both in the "well written and based on collected data" sense and the "something the whole community benefits from reading" sense.
Thanks! This comment got more upvotes than I predicted it would, so I'll try moving it to Main, but I understand if the mods want to move it back to discussion, because there's going to be quite a number of posts on this topic, and I can see how they wouldn't want that clogging up the front page.
Personally, I would be distraught if the front page got clogged up with well-written, interesting, and informative posts.
I'm a male LWer with an infant daughter. I'd like to request some specific advice on avoiding the common failure modes.
We're into holiday season again, so here's a link to a post I made a year ago, that includes, among other things, NOT always commenting on "How cute" all your little nieces (and nephews) are.
How To Talk To Children- A Holiday Guide
I remember this post well, thanks for reminding me. I've already been conditioning myself to focus on the right things by complimenting the hard work that goes into her lifting her head or briefly controlling her hands, even though she doesn't have any idea what I'm saying yet.
It's frustratingly difficult to buy any clothes for baby girls that aren't completely pink.
Learn to sew!
You can do a lot just topstitching appliques (great way to make superhero onesies).
Aren't babies kind of shaped alike? Surely there exist inoffensive onesies in pastel green or whatever, even if they are not officially intended for girls.
They exist, but it's like this: you walk into the store. To your left, there are forty pink dresses and onesies with Cutest Princess or somesuch printed on them. To your right, there are forty blue onesies and overall combos, often with anthropomorphic male animals printed on them. In the middle, there are three yellow or green onesies.
On top of that, well-meaning relatives send us boxes of the pink dresses.
When I dress her, I avoid the overtly feminine outfits. But then I worry that I'm committing an entirely new mistake. I imagine my daughter telling me how confused she felt that her father seemed reluctant to cast her as a girl. "Did you wish I was a boy, Daddy?" There don't seem to be many trivially obvious correct choices in parenting.
I have no experience in raising kids, but maybe the important part is having a wide range of outfits - have an overtly feminine outfit, but also a blue onesie with a tiger, and two or three green/yellow ones.
I've seen complaints about how much harder it is to find non-gendered clothing than it used to be.
I think the solution on clothes is that when the child is old enough to have opinions about how they want to dress, follow their lead.
You don't need to eradicate pink. Just reducing it to a reasonable level won't spur any 'Did you wish I was a boy' ideas.
Mine loves pink. We make sure to let her interest in non-pink things run free too (dinosaurs, space, trains, etc).
Actually, this seems a lot less disturbing to me than if, say, there were many different colors for boy clothes, but only pink clothing for girls. If you wouldn't feel obliged to avoid dressing a baby boy in blue, why feel obliged to avoid dressing a baby girl in pink? None of this has the moral that gender differences in general should be downplayed; it's when you start saying that male-is-default or 'people can be nerds but girls have to be girls' that you have a problem. In general, I think the mode of thought to be fought is that males are colorless and women have color; or to put it another way, the deadly thought is that there are all sorts of different people in the world like doctors, soldiers, mathematicians, and women. I do sometimes refer in my writing to a subgroup of people called "females"; but I refer to another subgroup, "males", about equally often. (Actually, I usually call them "women" and "males" but that's because if you say "men", males assume you're talking about people.)
I think clothing of both genders gets more varied with age, but faster for males, at least at first. I note that women actually come out ahead, with both pants and dresses, yet young boys wear noticeably more varied outfits. Clearly it clearly varies a lot with age.
Other. (See, postmodernism being good for something.) "Despite originally being a philosophical concept, othering has political, economic, social and psychological connotations and implications." Othering on the Geek Feminism wiki. See also grunch.
This isn't a how-to, but I thought you might find these articles cute:
Linky- Story of how parents of toddler boys keep their kids from playing rought with the author's toddler girl, because "you have to be gentle with girls".
Linky- Dad tired all video game heroes are male. Reprograms Zelda to make Link a female for little daughter.
Linky- Video- A What Would You Do? episode, where you see how people in a costume store react when a little boy (actor) wants to dress as a princess, and a little girl (actress) wants to dress as Spiderman for Halloween
Look for female role models and characters, wherever you can. My daughter is dinosaur-mad. The Usborne Big Book of Big Dinosaurs includes little cartoon palaeontologists - and she was delighted some were women. "I like the girl dinosaur scientist!" And then she came out with "When I was a three I wanted to be a princess, but now I am a five I want to be a dinosaur scientist." I CLAIM VICTORY. (so far.)
I suspect the problem there is that children are natural Platonic essentialists and categorise everything they can. (That big list of cognitive biases? Little kids show all of them, all of the time.) Particularly by gender. "Is that a boy toy or a girl toy?" It really helps that I have her mother (a monster truck pagan who knows everything and can do everything) to point at: "What would mummy think?" So having female examples on hand seems to have helped here. So I have this little girl who likes princesses and trains and My Little Pony and dinosaurs and Hello Kitty and space and is mad for anything pink and plays swordfighting with toy LARP swords. And her very favourite day out is the Natural History Museum.
(yeah, bragging about my kid again. You'll cope.)
The pill.
I don't understand how Christine the female dungeon master who has apparently consistently been playing with approximately gender-balanced groups not accommodating plowing fits in here. Plowing doesn't even seem like a particularly feminine activity (compared to e. g. trying for peaceful relations with the elves).
The writer and danerys thought so, apparently, and it made sense when I read it. Maybe you mean cultural_expectation_feminine, and that diverges from what geeky girls playing D&D are more likely to do than geeky boys?
My point is that I don't know what exactly they were thinking and that's why I'm asking. If they think that plowing in particular is a feminine activity that would make it somewhat more understandable, but it's not at all obvious to me from the post that this (their thinking so) is actually the case, and even then I don't quite see what was supposed to be signified since Christine was already regularly including things like making tea. Occams razor would suggest a single misapprehension the absence of which leads to the whole section to making sense more likely than multiple misapprehensions.
I don't think the idea is that real-world plowing is feminine so much as that choosing a non-violent activity in a role-playing game is a more likely choice for female players.
I want to make a point now (while we're still into the less controversial stuff), that I do not necessarily agree with everything I am going to be posting in this series, and (except for dividing some of the longer submissions, to put it in the proper themed post) I am, in general, not editing anything out of the submissions. I will edit the Intro part to specify this.
That said, in this particular instance, I do think what Julia Wise is saying is very worthwhile (Obviously, since she didn't submit that post. I found it on her blog and thought it was useful.) But note she didn't write that blog post specifically for this series. So some of the anecdotes rely less on gender than others. Overall, though, it is exactly the sort of thing that I think is a good start to this series of communication.
... if only because an aggressive team might use plowing to draw the elves out in a trap rather than trying to hunt them on their own turf!
Christine understood the game to be about combat, so she had planned an adventure that led us toward combat with the elves. But when she gave us details about starving farmers, my wanting to feed them was considered off-mission.
I don't have much data on what D&D is like with groups of different gender mixtures. At the time, we considered agricultural forays and many stops for "okay, now we make tea" to be things that probably didn't happen when boys played.
Addendum: approximately 900 people have now told me that this kind of thing happened in their groups too and is not a girl thing. Point taken.
My (normally all-male) groups have had a few forays into "make don't break," and many forays into "the DM wants us to do X? Y is the most important thing in the world right now."
In general, something I talk about with players is asking them how much of their ideal session is spent on combat, and how much is spent on role-playing. You get people who prefer 100% combat, and people who prefer 100% roleplaying, and seating those people at the same table is a bad idea. (I tend to go for >80% roleplaying myself, these days.) I would surprised if there weren't a male skew towards combat and a female skew towards roleplaying, but I also expect both distributions to be positive everywhere.
There's also a wealth of tabletop roleplaying systems out there these days, such that if you find your group prefers to mostly roleplay, you should play a game designed for mostly roleplay, rather than D&D, which is basically designed for >95% combat.
It's nice to see that LW's epistemic root system is dense enough to support explorations like these -- much better than freaking out and marring its own reputation a la the atheism vs. Atheism Plus flap. It sends a good message.
EDIT: This is the first thing I've read on LW that makes me think of it as a culture.
Here's hoping LW can do better at this than my own professional community.
That's not a high bar. I love my IT job, but IT is shamefully bad at this.
You know, I've noticed issues and heard about problems in math and the sciences before of this sort, but it seems like much more of a problem in IT. Any idea why?
One relevant datum: when I started my studies in math, about 33% of the students was female. In the same year, about 1% (i.e. one) of the computer science students was female.
It's possible to come up with other reasons - IT is certainly well-suited to people who don't like human interaction all that much - but I think that's a significant part of the problem.
I never consciously noticed that, but you're right. From what I remember the proportion of women in my CS classes wasn't quite that low, but it was still south of 10%. 33% also sounds about right for non-engineering STEM majors in my (publicly funded, moderately selective) university in the early-to-mid-Noughties, though that's skewed upward a bit by a student body that's 60% female.
It seems implausible, though, that a poor professional culture regarding gender would skew numbers that heavily in a freshman CS class -- most of these students are going to have had no substantial exposure to professional IT or related fields beforehand. I think we're looking at something with deeper roots. Specifically, CS is linked to geek subculture in a way that the rest of STEM isn't: you might naturally consider a math major if you were undecided and your best high-school grades were in mathematics, but there's no such path to IT. You generally only go into it if you already identify with the culture surrounding it and want to be part of it professionally.
With this in mind it seems likely to me that professional IT's attitudes are largely determined by the subculture's, not the other way around, and that gender ratios in CS aren't going to change much unless and until the culture changes.
CS and IT have become less gender-balanced (more male) in the past 20-30 years — over the same time frame that the lab sciences have gotten more balanced.
Uh, I'm pretty sure this assertion is the result of the particular culture that's developed in IT, rather than its truth being a cause of it.
Is this claim actually even close to true? To the extent that there are in fact professions "well-suited to people who don't like human interaction", by virtue of which problems the professionals are working to solve, I would think of farming or legal medicine first, not IT.
IT jobs require constant interaction with people, because they are mainly about turning vague desiderata into working solutions; on the "solution" end you are interacting a lot with machines, but you absolutely can't afford to ignore the "desiderata" side of things, and that is primarily a matter of human communication. Our current IT culture has managed to make it the norm that much of this communication can take place over cold channels, such as email or Word documents. I think of that as pathological; but more importantly, this still counts as human interaction!
Then there's the extra implication in your statement - that jobs "well-suited to people who don't like human interaction" will attract males more. That may well be true, but it'll take actual evidence to convince me.
Hey, people on the autistic spectrum and those with overwhelmingly poor social experiences have to get jobs too.
Now that I am done being a sarcastic bastard; many people have social anxiety, are terrible at reading subtle social cues including body language and are less hesitant and more eloquent communicators using text rather than face to face or over the phone. These people are disproportionately male. I strongly suspect that this is for the same reason autistic spectrum people are disproportionately male.
If it is currently true that IT is friendly er to people who are not great socially it will attract more people like that by at least two channels; reputation/common knowledge and affinity chains, people with bad social skills being friends with similar people who get each other, who have much less in the way of communication issues with each other than they do with normal people.
I think IT jobs currently attract people with poor social skills more for the above reasons. I am much more confident that said prevalence deters some people from those careers who could do them and that the deterrence/repulsion effect is stronger for the average female than the average male.
How IT got into the situation where it was abnormally hospitable to people who are bad at normal human interaction I hesitate to speculate upon.
This doesn't appear to be true for the clinical definition of social anxiety. What you're describing sounds more like a mix of social anxiety and autistic traits than pure social anxiety disorder, but although there is a substantial gender gap in autism diagnosis, it doesn't look wide enough to account for the observed ratios.
Autism rates combined with the observed gender gap in the rest of STEM come close, but for this to be the whole story we'd need almost no non-ASD folks to go into IT, and that doesn't seem to be the case.
A lot of people in IT interact plenty with other people in IT, so they like and can sustain some types of human interaction.
What is an epistemic root system, and how can they be dense?
It's an imperfect metaphor for everybody trusting each other to think real good. Dense root systems help prevent erosion (in this case of epistemic standards).
To any catcalling experts:
I look female. I go out on my own or with other female-looking young adults rather often. I live in a poor neighborhood. Why have I never gotten catcalled? I am ugly and dress unfemininely and shabbily, but Internet feminists claim this doesn't reduce catcalling much, and men do sometimes politely hit on me.
Maybe you live somewhere other than where the Internet feminists live. I wouldn't be surprised if the prevalence of such behaviours varied by an order of magnitude from one region to another, even within the western world.
EDIT: Indeed, a couple months ago an Italian friend of mine living in Barcelona posted something on Facebook about being constantly catcalled whenever she went in a particular district, from which I guess it hadn't happened to her (or hadn't happened that often) elsewhere.
I agree that regional variations are likely.
A problem with reporting on all the bad interactions is that you don't get a feeling for how common they are (just that they aren't extremely rare), let alone much detail about demographic features.
Just curious: do you intentionally look female?
My subconscious picture of you was more masculine. (Possibly due to the pseudonym "MixedNuts.")
EDIT: Just to be crystal clear, I don't mean that judgmentally.
I prefer neutral pronouns and will tolerate male ones. I can't pass for anything other than female right now, so I don't usually try. I expect that will change in the future.
I'm curious about this as well.
I got a very similar response when my Lawful Neutral Cleric wanted to set up a formal inquisition to root out the evil cultists in the city rather than go to the big bad's cave and whack them on the head. Also a barbarian of mine wanted to run a brothel after the party defeated the gang that controlled it before. It mysteriously burned down the following night.
In general some DMs have a hard time dealing with characters that want to weave baskets instead of going hack and slash.
My lawful neutral character attacked the rest of the party when they assaulted a group of innocent (until proven guilty) goblins in the first encounter.
Did he win?
A DM needs to improvise 95% of their session, I've found.
D&D rules are mostly combat rules. If somebody says they want to play D&D, most people assume they want to play in such a way that the D&D rules are relevant. This isn't a safe assumption, because the name "Dungeons and Dragons" is famous enough that some people will claim they want to play it without knowing what it involves. DMs should clarify to new players that D&D is heavily combat focused, and point out more suitable systems if the player isn't interested in that.
The DM could let the elves attack during plowing. Should be a strong incentive to get into a fight.
I assume most people find this statement offensive and objectionable. If you are such a person, can you provide a rational justification for your response? It seems to me that the father is simply making a set of empirical claims about reality, and so at worst the statement is just inaccurate.
Also, imagine a father telling his son "You need to get a good job and learn how to dress well, or else no woman will want to marry you." Is this statement similarly objectionable? If so, why?
There's a few parts. Let's charitably assume that the father is just making an empirical statement, to shorten the list.
He assumes that his daughter needs to achieve the prerequisites of marriage - that she needs to get married. (And that it's his job to prepare her for this, even if only informationally.)
He assumes she's going to marry a man.
He describes her future marriage in terms of the wants of her hypothetical husband, as opposed to hers (compare something like, "You need to be able to dump guys over long-term dealbreakers without dating them for years, or how will you find a man you want to marry?")
He is wrong as a statement of fact, because there exist men who would marry a woman who doesn't clean and cook - and this isn't just a harmless falsehood (compare the implausible "you need to wear cunning knitted hats and eat parsley, or what man would want to marry you?"), but one that draws attention to evaluating his daughter's value in terms of her domestic skills - a pattern that is reinforced elsewhere, while cunning knitted hats and parsley are not.
Some of those objections disappear if you treat the father's advice as a heuristic and not an absolute rule - something like "being able to cook and keep a house clean increases your chances of finding a desirable long-term partner"; especially objection 2 (I would expect a woman would also prefer a partner who can cook and keep a house clean, all else being equal) and 4 (even if some men are perfectly okay with a wife that can't cook, I would expect that all else being equal being able to cook still makes one a more desirable partner).
"There are exceptions to that rule" is close to a fully general counterargument, because there are exception to pretty much any rule (outside the hard sciences), and I'm a bit annoyed when such an exceptions is used to triumphantly "refute" an argument (for example "once there was this guy who would have died if he had been wearing a seat belt!").
I do agree that the statement is sneaking in some iffy connotations like "your value as a woman is who you marry" and "you don't pick a husband, you get picked", and even if knowing how to cook does make increase the chances one ends up in a happy long-term relationship, other traits probably have more bang for the buck.
If you interpret the father's statement as "all else being equal, being a better cook is good" and you completely divorce it from a historical and cultural context, it is indeed not really problematic. But given that we are, in fact, talking culture here, I do not think that this is the interpretation most likely to increase your insight.
(not disagreeing, but note that I'm not saying the statement isn't problematic, merely saying that some objections are better than others)
But my whole point was that if it's an empirical statement, then we shouldn't be offended by it. That position seems fundamental to the whole rationalist project - a minor corollary of the Litany of Tarski is "If X is true, I want people to tell me that X is true [1]". X can be "the sky is blue" or "women who can cook and clean have better marriage prospects", it really shouldn't matter.
Think about the precedent you are setting when you get offended by an empirical statement. First of all, you are attacking the messenger - the fact that potential suitors will evaluate a woman in part based on her domestic skills is perhaps deplorable, but it's hardly the father's fault. Second, you are giving your allies an incentive to hide potentially important social information from you, since you have established the fact that you will sometimes get angry at them for telling you things.
[1] A better statement of this idea would be "If the probability of X is p(X), I want the proportion of people who tell me X is true to be p(X)". The people who advocate the minority positions (i.e. iconoclasts) are actually crucial to forming a well-calibrated picture of the world - without them you will become disastrously overconfident. You should take a moment today to thank your friendly neighborhood iconoclast.
An empirical statement, even a true one, can place undue emphasis on a particular fact. There's a hundred things in the same reference class that the father could have said; this particular one isn't being picked out because it is more true than the others, but because it conforms to gender stereotypes.
Yes, well... I don't agree with your point!
Some empirical statements, orthogonal to truth or falsity, are offensive. Virtually any claim can be made in an inappropriate way even if it's not intrinsically problematic (if someone shouted the multiplication tables at the top of their lungs in a public space for an hour, I might not use the word "offended" to describe my reaction, but I would sure want it to stop). Some claims can be made in a normal tone of voice during a conversation between consenting conversational partners and still be offensive. Many insults are empirical in nature. Slander/libel is generally empirical, although it's false if it can be described by those words. "I fucked your mom" is a claim about reality, true or false though it may be in any given instance; most people will be offended by it and they aren't wrong.
The particular statement under evaluation here is problematic for the reasons I outlined. Even if the statement is true and its content is appropriate - even if we assume that the man's daughter wants to grow up and marry a man and is perhaps actively soliciting advice about how to appeal to a wider pool of suitors - then he owed it to her to be gentler, less judgmental, and less endorsing of the stereotypical pattern about which he was trying to communicate information. Maybe "Well, a whole lot of men value domestic ability in a prospective wife - cooking, cleaning, that sort of thing." Same information, less harmful baggage.
The slander/libel case seems instructive: truth is an absolute defense against the accusation of slander or libel; it's the falsehood of a slanderous statement that harms.
Shouting the times-tables is a problem because of the delivery mechanism, not the content. Shouting anything at the top of your lungs for an hour in a public space is harmful to bystanders, and as you said, "offensive" is not what is wrong here.
"I fucked your mom", if true, is only potentially offensive for something like the following reasons:
In short, I don't think I buy your claim that "Some empirical statements, orthogonal to truth or falsity, are offensive." At least, I'd like to see it supported better before I consider it. This isn't simply contrarianism; I think that the ability and right to say true things regardless of whether someone finds those truths unpleasant is extremely important, and social norms to the contrary should not be adopted or perpetuated lightly.
Not in my jurisdiction. Here, accurately reporting the details of spent criminal convictions with demonstrably malicious intent can be defamatory. Innuendoes can be too, even if the explicit statements (or images) involved are basically accurate.
Ah yes, thank you for mentioning this; I'd heard that such things are the case in British law, but had forgotten. A quick googling informs me that certain recent court rulings may have undermined truth as an absolute defense in the United States as well.
All I can say in response is that I think such laws are quite wrong. Truth should be an absolute defense. It is my opinion that most situations where making the truth known harms someone, are cases that highlight some systemic or widespread injustice, rather than cases of the truth being inherently harmful.
I can think of at least one major exception: matters related to privacy. That is quite a different thing, however, from something being offensive... an inherently offensive truth is something of whose existence I've yet to be convinced.
Some examples of empirical statements with questionable-to-bad ethical undertones. I present them to you as food for thought, not as some sort of knock-down argument.
Not lightly, no. But as I was saying to Daniel_Burfoot above, there is just no avoiding the fact that statements, including statements of truth, are speech-acts. They will affect interlocutors' probability distributions AND their various non-propositional states (emotions, values, mood, self-worth, goals, social comfort level, future actions, sexual confidence, prejudices). Inconvenient as human mind-design is, it's really hard to suppress that aspect of it.
But there is a big asymmetry here - you (the speaker) know what you mean, so if it really needs to be said, take an extra second to formulate it in the way that has the least perlocutionary disutility.
These are food for thought indeed. My thoughts on some of them, intended as ruminations and not refutations:
I'm not sure what I think about this one. I do note that it would probably be perceived differently by someone who was aware of its truth (this person would certainly be hurt by the reminder of the bad thing), than by someone who was not (i.e. a religious person).
Exploitation of cognitive biases in the audience. Certainly an unethical and underhanded tactic, but note that its effectiveness depends on insufficient sanity in the listeners. Granted, however, that the bar for "sufficient sanity" is relatively high in such matters.
This one is interesting. A tangential thought: have there been studies to determine the power of stereotype threat to affect people who are aware of stereotype threat?
I think I'd have to agree that harping on such a fact would be annoying, at best. I do want to note that one solution I would vehemently oppose would be to forbid such statements from being made at all.
There's something wrong with your assessment here and I can't quite put my finger on it. Intuitively it feels like the category of "blame" is being abused, but I have to think more about this one.
The problem here, I think, is that some people use "X is going to happen" with the additional meaning of "X should happen", often without realizing it; in other words they have the unconscious belief that what does happen is what should happen. Such people often have substantial difficulty even understanding replies like "Yes, X will happen, but it's not right for X to happen"; they perceive such replies as incoherent. The quoted statement can well be true, and if said by someone who is clear on the distinction between "is" and "ought", is not, imo, offensive.
See above. Also, there's a difference between "A black man will never hold the highest office in this country, and therefore I will not vote for Barack Obama" and "A black man will never hold the highest office in this country; this is an empirical prediction I am making, which might be right or wrong, and is separate from what I think the world should be like."
If I think X will happen (or not happen), it's important (imo) that I have the ability and right to make that empirical prediction, unimpeded by social norms against offense. If people who are afflicted with status quo bias, or other failures of reasoning, fail to distinguish between "is" and "ought" and in consequence take my prediction to have some sort of normative content — well, it may be flippant to say "that's their problem", but the situation definitely falls into the "audience is insufficiently intelligent/sane" category. Saying "this statement is offensive" in such a case is not only wrong, it's detrimental to open discourse.
I happen to be reading Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate right now, and he comments on that well-known failing of twentieth-century social sciences, the notion that "we must not even consider empirical claims of inequality in people's abilities, because that will lead to discrimination". Aside from the chilling effect this has on, you know, scientific inquiry, there's also an ethical problem:
If you think that pointing out differences in ability will lead to discrimination, then you must think that it's not possible to treat people with equal fairness unless they are the same along all relevant dimensions. That's a fairly clear ethical failing. In other words, if your objection to "some people are less intelligent than other people" is "but then the less intelligent people will be discriminated against!", you clearly think that it's not possible to treat people fairly regardless of their intelligence... and if that's the case, then that is the problem we should be opposing. We shouldn't say "No no, all people are the same!" We should say, "Yes, people are different. No, that's not an excuse to treat some people worse."
Agreed. I just think that branding certain sorts of statements as "offensive" is entirely the wrong way to go about treating this issue with the care it deserves, because of the detrimental effects that approach has on free discourse.
Agreed, and I think this is a special case of the illusion of transparency.
(P.S. Today I learned the word "perlocutionary". Thank you.)
Maybe, although I strongly suspect religious people alieve that their relatives are gone (otherwise, as others have noted, a funeral would be more like a going-away party).
Good question. Wikipedia turns up this link, which would seem to say "Yes." So happily, the corrective for this contextually harmful empirical statement is a contextually helpful empirical statement.
Oh yes, certainly. Refusing to notice ingroup/outgroup differences is just the opposite failure mode.
I am still philosophically confused about this issue, although I have been thinking about it for a while. You are probably objecting to the fact that ex hypothesi, less revealing clothing leads to fewer sexual assaults, so why wouldn't we follow that advice - yes? As I say, I don't have a full account of that. All I wanted to draw attention to is the ethical questionable-ness of making such a statement without any acknowledgement that one is asking potential victims to change their (blameless) behaviour in order to avoid (blameworthy) assault from others. Compounding the issue is the suspicion that statements like this ALSO tend to be a form of whitewashed slut-shaming.
Yes, in my experience this is very common in muggle society.
Right. The rubric that I try to use in such situations is essentially a consequentialist one. Roughly speaking, the idea is that you should try to predict how your statements might be misinterpreted by a (possibly silly) audience, and if the expected harm of the misinterpretation is significant as compared to the potential benefit of your statement, then reformulate/be silent/narrow your audience/educate your audience about why they shouldn't misinterpret you. I sympathize, believe me! It's incredibly annoying to be read uncharitably. But if you know how to prevent an uncharitable/harmful reading, and don't as a matter of principle because the audience should know better... I think the LW term for that would be "living in the should-universe."
As it happens, I broadly agree about the term "offensive," which is an incredibly censorious and abuse-prone word. I think we should try to give better fault assessments than that - and happily, on LW most people usually do.
As an aside, I almost forgot a really good example of the phenomenon of "harmful facts," which is that the suicide rate in a region goes up whenever a suicide is reported on the news. Indeed, death rates in general go up whenever a suicide is reported, because many suicides are not recognized as such (e.g., somebody steers into oncoming traffic).
For this reason, police tend to hush suicides up (at least, they did in my old hometown & I think it's widespread).
What moral theory are you using in the parenthetical comment? For example, according to naive utilitarianism it makes no sense to divide causal links leading to harm into "blameless" and "blameworthy".
I completely accept that the father's statement was framed poorly and that he should have been more tactful and diplomatic, but that seems like a relatively minor misdemeanor and is also unrelated to the points raised in your original comment.
I am going to stand by my basic claim that rationalists should try to build an environment where people can make statements about their perceptions of reality without fear of social repercussions.
The flip side of that is building an environment where people clearly differentiate normative claims from empirical ones. The father (I would guess intentionally) failed to do this, which is a moral failing on his part - he seems to be trying to guide his daughter into a traditional gender role, not disinterestedly providing her anthropological facts about her (assumed) future dating pool. When doing the latter, he should use more objective language and also explicitly state his moral position on the status quo.
As to making empirical statements without the fear of social disapproval, I don't think that's possible. All statements are speech acts - affecting our emotions and values - and empirical statements are no different. Trying to build a community that is tone-deaf to the implications of a technically true empirical statement like "Jews are apes" is not a particularly desirable goal. If you want to transmit empirical truths with a potentially nasty social undertone, there is no shortcut but to try your best to disavow the undertone.
The image that formed in my mind was hilarious -- probably because my brain found it extremely implausible that somebody could do that for an hour straight without being made to stop in real life, so it thought about a comedy movie instead. The image that would work for me is imagining that someone engraved the Dirac equation on my car using a nail.
When epistemic rationality is counter to instrumental rationality
Epistemic rationality is about knowing the truth. Instrumental rationality is about meeting your goals.
The general case is that the more truth you know, the better you are at meeting your goals (and so instrumental and epistemic rationality are heavily tied to each other), however there exist rare occurrences where this is not the case.
More importantly, there are many times when SPEAKING the truth is counter to your goals.
For an absurd example: Say you are in a room full of angry convicts with knives. It probably is counter to your goal of staying alive and healthy to start proclaiming TRUE but insulting statements.
More realistically, raising children is one example where, if your goal is to raise happy, sane, well-adjusted adults, there are many statements that should NOT be spoken, no matter how true they are.
Examples:
Even if it the cooking and cleaning statement were epistemically true, it is not instrumentally rational to tell this to your child if your goal is to have her grow into an independent adult who can support herself, and does not feel bound by the "traditional" gender roles (which are falling out of favor anyway).
Likewise, if you value having a higher percentage of women on this site, it is not instrumentally rational to make statements such as "You only got upvoted because you're a girl", or "<X> girls aren't as attractive as <Y> girls," EVEN IF you believe that said statements are true.
I highly value truth. But a prime reason I value it is because it allows me to meet my goals. When speaking the truth is harmful to my goals, it is wise to hold my tongue.
Why? I was under the impression that not telling children about sex was usually the result of an emotional hangup on the part of the parents and/or a culturally cached thought that originally arose from the “sex is dirty” meme from the medieval/early modern Christianity memeplex (possibly both things reinforcing one another), rather than a rational expectation that the child would be worse off if they knew about sex based on any kind of actual evidence. Am I wrong? (How common is that taboo among non-European-derived cultures?)
Telling children how sex works is important. You can do this when they ask about it or when they reach some level of sophistication that will let them understand the explanation you're ready to give. Telling anyone - especially your child - that you just had sex on the couch is a poor choice (outside of some plausible dynamics that consenting unrelated adults could set up). It's none of their business, and a psychologically typical child won't want it to be their business or will be embarrassed to have so wanted when they get older.
Okay. For some reason I had focused on the "What's sex? Well..." (and assumed the dots stood for a truthful answer) rather than the "Your mom and I just had sex on the living room couch" part. (I'm reminded of parents customarily making shit up when asked what condoms are or how children are born -- even just saying "I'll tell you when you're older" would make more sense IMO.)
Sorry, that was partially my bad. The purpose of the "What's sex?" part was to illustrate that this was a younger child. (In my mind these were all preschoolers in the examples). I didn't consider that people might read that to mean that I don't think sex should be discussed truthfully with children. I do! But at a certain age, and in the right context (NOT in the context of parents discussing their own sexcapades.)
Why? Can you justify this without appealing to the traditions about sex and gender that you've just been arguing against?
IMO:
Traditions or not, the role of a child doesn't "by default" include any script for interaction, even as an unwilling observer, with the parents' sex life. A child simply wouldn't be sure how to process and break down something they see or hear from it.
People instinctively appear to see familial and sexual intimacy as two separate kinds of bonds, and the mind-screw that comes with mixing them might be one of the reasons for having incest fantasies. Such a mind-screw could easily be discomforting/unpleasant in everyday contexts!
I don't think this example is in the same class as the other ones...as in, there's a certain age at which I would think that it is a good idea to tell your child, at the very least, that torture/factory farming/poverty exist. Preferably in a "let's think of something small that you could do about nasty situation XYZ" format. I wouldn't recommend telling 4-year-olds about these things-they aren't at an age to understand them-but 10-11 year olds is a different story. To do otherwise is to raise children to unconsciously ignore these issues, as most adults do. These issues exist.
In my mind, the examples were for preschoolish age children, but now that you mention it, I see that I didn't include anything specifying age in the grandparent. I'll edit to say so.
Man, except for the 'I could do better' part (I can't), I tell my kid this all the time.
Indeed. But why suppose those goals? I would value my daughter's happiness above her being independent and untraditional, in part because the former seems absolute while the latter two seem relational. When there are conflicting goals, all we can discuss are the empirical results of polices, and it's not clear to me that this is a case where accomplishing goals and speaking the truth conflict.
All of those examples are cases of the hearer being insufficiently intelligent, insufficiently sane, or insufficiently mentally developed, and thus not equipped to hear truth-statements without taking unreasonable offense. Into which of those categories do you think the women on LW fall...? I'm going to guess "none of the above". But that leaves you with an absence of examples that actually support your point.
Also: the empirical statement "making this statement will probably lead to this-and-such bad outcome for me" is not equivalent to the value judgment "this statement is offensive [to this-and-such part of my audience]".
IME certain topics are so mind-killing that few people are sufficiently intelligent, sane and mentally developed for them -- even on LW.
Likely so. Do you think that classifying statements on such topics as "offensive" is the appropriate conclusion? I do not, but perhaps we are operating under different notions of "offensive". It seems to me that if the problem with a statement is solved by fixing the listener's deficiencies (intelligence, sanity, mental development, etc.), then "offensive" is not really the issue at hand.
Back at the top of this thread, what is discussed is "A father tells his daughter X. Some here may find that objectionable." - what would be obejctionable wouldn't be X, but the fact that a father tells his daughter X.
Daenerys's examples are analogous to X - things that may not be particularly offensive as truth statements, but that one still may not want to tell small children.
(I think in this subthread some don't pay enough attention to the differences between "what's okay for discussion on LW" and "what's okay for a father-daughter discussion")
Hmmm, a fair point. I took the people objecting to said statement as saying that it's offensive/objectionable in general, or offensive/objectionable to them specifically, rather than saying "maybe so, but perhaps not something you should say to your kid". If my interpretation was incorrent, I apologize.
The truth is not immutable. It seems that many people on this site would elevate empirical facts (what is) into normative rules (what ought to be). Clearly, if X is just the Way Things Are, then there's no use fighting it; a good rationalist learns to accept that X is true, and work with that knowledge instead of ignoring its reality. (X could be anything from atheism to "black people statistically commit more crimes" to "most men refuse to marry a woman who can't cook".)
But just because something is empirically true now doesn't mean it has to be true forever. This is especially the case with social norms. Feminists aren't trying to say "men really don't care about a woman's cooking skills, and fathers who tell their daughters this are wrong". They're not denying that the world is this way, they're just denying that it ought to be this way. And a reliable way to change social norms is to teach new social norms to the next generation!
Be aware that when you speak a truth such as "Men only marry women who can cook", you are not just acknowledging a fact but perpetuating it. You are not just an objective scientific observer of a fact, but a subjective participant in that fact.
I don't think this is the case. In fact, most criticism of the original statement centres around the fact that it was insufficiently clear whether it was empirical or normative.
A cursory search reveals at least two relevant posts: 'Is' and 'Ought' and Rationality and SotW: Check Consequentialism
Nonetheless, people should indeed pick their battles, and fight those unpalatable truths they think most worth fighting.
Er, not necessarily. Local maxima can be dangerous to venture away from.
Suppose that it'd be safer for everybody to drive on the right side of the road than for everybody to drive on the left side (as a consequence of most people being right-handed), and you're living in a country where it's customary to drive on the left side. You wouldn't teach your children to drive on the right side, would you?
I'm going to sidestep the talk of "offense" because I think it's sufficient to talk about whether a statement is morally right or wrong ("offensive" seems to be "morally wrong" with some extra baggage).
Two cases in which I might judge an empirical statement as morally wrong:
1) the statement is false, and yes, saying false things is usually considered morally wrong
2) the statement is true, but is used in a context where it will have negative repercussions - for example, telling your kid a huge amount of factually true statistics that cast a bad light upon a group you don't like (blacks, jews, women, etc.), or teaching a madman how to make explosives, etc.
In this case we're talking about the value a statement not in the abstract, but as life advice given from a father to his daughter. The important part isn't as much the truth of that particular piece of advice, but of what it allows us to infer about the general quality of the life advice given.
Er... if p(anthropogenic global warning is occurring | all publicly available evidence) is 85%, I'm not sure what I want is 85% of the people to tell me anthropogenic global warning is occurring and 15% of the people to tell me it's not.
Yes, and for very similar reasons.
See also: success myth
What you should probably be looking for is people who didn't find the statement offensive or objectionable but who understand the psychology and game theory of the situation well enough to calmly explain it. The sort of human that gets offended isn't generally the sort of human that is worth asking questions. Presumably you know this but you're making a political (in a broad sense of 'political') point about the importance of having the automatic habit (at the zero-point-two-second level) of making clean distinctions between empirical and normative claims. But come on dude, that's just baby town frolicks. Shouldn't you be making comments on a higher level and about more important things?
I would like to see LW become a place where people don't get offended by empirical statements - that seems like an achievable goal. But you are probably right that this kind of debate usually doesn't lead anywhere productive.
Alicorn gave an excellent summary. But there's another issue also. When people say this sort of thing it is often with implicit premises that it is a massively important part of a woman's life to get married, to an extent that doesn't exist as much with men (with exceptions to some extent to certain ethnic and cultural groups which emphasize grandchildren). If you scratch this sort of thing beneath the surface you often find beneath the surface something like "Women exist to cook, clean, and pump out babies. If they go to college it should be to get an MRS degree."
Both messages are only about the past/current state of things and leave no room for "The old model stinks, and I hope your generation will continue changing it."
I prepared for adulthood/marriage on the old model, and it did not serve me well. It was like getting a job only to find that my typewriter skills weren't needed. Early on we had a series of dinnertime arguments that boiled down to: "Have some more food." "No, thanks, I'm done." "I cooked you this Good Food because I am a Good Wife! Why can't you appreciate the work I put into being good at this? Eat the damn food!"
Are statements about the current state of affairs in general objectionable? If I tell my child not to be openly homosexual in Saudi Arabia, is this bad advice, even though the current Saudi Arabian model stinks and I hope their generation will continue changing it?
The issue is that language is often imprecise, and so people often make a descriptive statement which has normative connotations. Thus, when making that sort of thing it is important to be clear not just descriptively what is happening but normatively what one thinks about it.
It depends on how close things are to changing (or whether they have already changed). "You need to learn to cook and keep house" was more practical advice in the 1930s than in the 1980s. "Don't be openly gay" is practical advice in Saudi Arabia but probably not in New York.
As an extra anecdote, my wife says she prepared on the old model, and that it did serve her well (or at least, she doesn't regret).
I can see two perspectives:
A) The "traditional" model is good advice for a majority of the population, but is useless or harmful for a minority, in which case situations (like yours) where the advice failed may not be enough evidence that the advice was bad.
B) The "traditional" model may have been useful in the past, but society has changed too much (we live in large cities and know few of our neighbors; there's less physical work, a single earner can not usually support a family any more, many house tasks have been automated or outsourced), that the "traditional" model is about as useful as career advice from the 1920s.
I expect it's a mix of both, with the second effect probably being a bit stronger.
This might be why my grandma gets very annoyed when I don't eat all of the food she cooks.
Partially. It isn't as objectionable because when this was said to me, and I replied "Well, I don't want to get married", nobody tried to tell me that I was wrong to think so.
I skimmed the options too quickly -- I'd have picked "not offensive" if I'd noticed it.
I voted “Less offensive” -- and would have picked “Not offensive” if the “and having one will make your life more fun” part weren't there. The way I would phrase it is “You'd better be able to cook and keep a clean house if you want to get married some day”. (Or maybe even without the “if you want to get married some day” -- why someone living on their own wouldn't need those skills?)
Economics! You can substitute those skills for the ability to earn money to pay people who have them.
I dunno how much it'd cost to hire someone to clean up my house, but ISTM that cooking my own dinner takes less time and much less stamina than earning the money to eat a similar dinner in a restaurant.
Buying frozen prepared food or whatever is also a form of paying someone to cook for you. Restaurants are just one option.
That tends to be either much more expensive than the ingredients or absolutely awful. (But it's still what I usually do when I can't be bothered to cook a meal from scratch.)
I'm with you - I cook most things I eat from scratch - but some people seem indifferent to the disadvantages of making the tradeoff here.
I think most people just haven't considered it as a tradeoff. Then again, maybe there are some people for whom the effort/unpleasantness of buying ingredients, looking up a recipe, and cooking from scratch is less than the unpleasantness of working X extra hours (or losing the ability to buy Y other things) in order to pay for more expensive prepared foods. I also think that a lot of people do like prepared foods better-I cook everything I eat from scratch, and there's always plenty in the fridge, but my roommate still buys frozen pizzas and TV dinners and eats out frequently, even though she's financially worse off than me and could eat my food for free without even having to make the effort to cook it.
They probably would. But it's a very different statement.
In fact, shortly before I graduated college my mother said to me (a male) that I should learn to cook because it would make me more independent. She was right.
There is also some difference between learning to cook and clean for yourself and for someone else. With one, you can follow your own taste. With the other, you need to memorize typical taste.
But mostly it's a very different statement.
I voted "equally offensive".
Framing useful skills as being primarily relevant insofar as they fulfill cultural imperatives that a dependent has probably not yet decided whether or not to comply with is harmful both in terms of denigrating the useful skill and in terms of reinforcing the expectation that the cultural imperative will be fulfilled. Assuming the speaker is someone the dependent believes has their best interests at heart, saying "it will help you" instead of "you need" is just a different way of being manipulative.
In a void, either statement is offensive regardless of the dependent's gender. In actuality, I'd submit that it is somewhat more offensive to suggest cooking and cleaning to a female dependent simply because it does not do anything to encourage the dependent to question what everyone else is telling her, whereas I'd guess that there are plenty of cultural messages deterring males from cooking and cleaning.
Would you feel the same way about "It would help you to do your math homework so you can graduate high school and get a decent job?" After all, the idea that everyone should graduate high school is a cultural imperative, and some teenagers may not yet have decided whether this is important to them.
I'll sort of bite this bullet---I have to say "sort of", because I know that social science is extremely difficult, and that radical changes that sound like a good idea to the speaker often have disastrous unforeseen consequences, such that I should be very prepared to modify my current opinions in light of new empirical evidence---but yes, the cultural imperative that everyone must graduate high school regardless of individual circumstances (e.g., "I want to devote myself to studying this particular topic that happens to not be taught at local high schools") causes a lot of real harm for the same reasons that the cultural imperative that all women must learn domestic skills regardless of individual circumstances (e.g., "I don't want to be a housewife") causes a lot of real harm.
Currently-existing social norms do serve real functions, the details of which someone who knows more than me could no doubt elaborate on, but they aren't intelligently designed for human well-being, either. On the current margin, would it be better to have more conformity, or less?---given my current info and preferences, my guess is less: if you can find a way to do better for yourself in an unconventional way that doesn't actually seem to hurt anyone, then I say go ahead and take it.
I think you may be underestimating how hard it is to do better than tradition.
Not quite -- mainly because finishing high school even if you didn't want to/really give it much thought is more likely to be an overall benefit, whereas getting married even if you didn't want to/give it much thought is unlikely to turn out happily.
Without more information, I'm not sure that "do your math homework" is going to be as useful as "learn to cook and clean".
I think the VERY best outcome would be to train children as early as possible to make independent and well-informed decisions, and then a better phrasing would be "If your plans [still] involve graduating high school, it would help you to do your math homework", or possibly "it would help you to drop this class, since you are obviously not inclined to do your math homework". But I'm not sure how long before ~graduating-age that's even developmentally possible.
Poor question framing. Some people would say it was both equally offensive and not offensive, if they didn't think the former was offensive.
Point.
If you did not find the original offensive, please do not vote at all. The purpose of the poll was to investigate why people found this original offensive. So if you did not, applying this introspective probe serves no purpose.
I would edit this into the post, but ISTR that editing posts with polls is bad.
I think the sexism isn't telling that to your daughter -- it's not also telling that to your son.
ISTM that, until a few generations ago, people traditionally lived with their parents until they got married (in their early twenties, sometimes even in their late teens), and lived with their spouses thereafter. The husband traditionally had a full-time job, and the wife stayed home and was in charge of the housework (incl. cooking). Therefore, a man never actually needed to know how to do housework, because he would always live with a woman (his mother until he married, then his wife) who would do that for him. (Conversely, a woman never actually needed to work, because she would always live with a man (her father until she married, then her husband) who would bring home the bacon for her.) So, within the traditional gender roles, a male would never need to be told those words Julia Wise heard from her father.
Nowadays, instead, people (of either gender) who complete high school typically rent an apartment with roommates (often all of the same gender) in order to attend university, may (or may not) get married in their late twenties (sometimes even in their early thirties or later), and when they do, often both spouses have a job, so neither has the time/stamina/willingness to do all of the housework and they share it. So people of either gender will have to know how to do housework starting from college age. There is still a cliché that men can't cook, but it's mostly repeated tongue-in-cheek and hardly anybody seems to actually really believe it. (I'm talking about Italy -- YMMV.)
When my dad told me “I've heard that $bank is hiring -- why don't you apply there?”, I said “I'm not interested -- I'm going to start a PhD next year; if my ambition had been to work in a bank I wouldn't be studying physics” and he said “but it would be one of the best [i.e., highest-paying] jobs one could get!”, I kind-of freaked out -- and he hadn't even mentioned marriage!
(OTOH, when my mother told me the one about keeping a clean house (with “what woman” instead of “what man”), I just thought ‘Well, I hope not all women are as obsessed with cleanliness as you’ and IIRC said nothing in particular and smiled (i.e., pretended to think she was joking). So, in my case, it's the one about jobs that felt more objectionable. YMMV.)
It bothers me how many of these comments pick nits ("plowing isn't especially feminine", "you can't unilaterally declare Crocker's Rules") instead of actually engaging with what has been said.
(And those are just women's issues; women are not the only group that sometimes has problems in geek culture, or specifically on Less Wrong.)
Perhaps an instance of Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate; people who agree, do not respond... as for me, I find myself with two kinds of responses to these anecdotes. For some, I think "Wow, what an unfortunate example of systemic sexism etc.; how informative, and how useful that this is here." Other people have already commented to that effect. I'm not sure what I might say in terms of engaging with such content, but perhaps something will come to me, in which case I'll say something.
For others... well, here's an example:
My response is a mental shrug. I am male. I can relate to this anecdote completely. I, too, have never much understood the desire to be "normal", and I find that as I've gotten older, I disdain it more and more.
But what has this to do with minimizing the inferential distance between men and women...?
Here's another:
The gist of this anecdote seems to be "girls like Star Wars too". Duly noted. As an anecdote in isolation I can't say it surprises me. (At least two of my female friends are huge Dr. Who geeks. In general I would be surprised if anyone here found "geek girls exist" to be a novel and unexpected claim.) It's not necessarily clear what more general conclusion I ought to draw from this, or what conclusion (if any) is implied by the OP, and so the extent of my potential engagement is limited.
What would differentiate picking nits and engaging with what was said?
Like SaidAchmiz points out, there's not all that much to say when someone shares information. I'm certainly not going to share the off-site experiences of female friends that were told to me in confidence, and my experiences are not particularly relevant, and so I don't have much to add.
One of the issues that has poisoned conversations about feminism I have been in previously, and which I sincerely hope does not happen here, is that the feminists in the conversation did not have a strong ability to discern between useful and useless criticisms. I understand that many people don't listen to women, especially about their experience as women; I understand that many people dismiss good feminist arguments, or challenge them with bad arguments.
But when people do listen, and respond with good arguments- and then their good arguments are trivialized or dismissed- then we're not having a conversation, but a lecture. The people putting forth good arguments realize they're not welcome and leave, and only the trolls are left.
Especially in the context of minimizing inferential distance, it's important to have experience exchange both ways. For example, DMs shutting down a player's attempt to deviate from the script is a common enough experience that I expect more than half of D&D players can relate, and letting the person who shared the anecdote know that "yep, this is a common problem" is valuable information that can help them feel less singled out. Of course, this can be interpreted as a status-reduction move; they're trivializing the concerns and making the speaker less special! This is the uncharitable interpretation and so in general I recommend against it.
It really bothers me that you're not taking seriously either the (hopefully unintentional) misuse of Crocker's Rules or the unintentional violation of IRC norms. Those rules apply to everyone and are in place for good reason, and pointing out rule violations should not be seen as picking nits if you want those rules to stick around.
I think this is an excellent point, and in the interests both of minimizing inferential distance and perhaps making some other points relevant to smart/geeky women's issues, I offer a personal anecdote:
My early experiences as a D&D player included some memorable instances when I tried to "deviate from script", though at the time I didn't entirely understand that there was a script and that I was deviating from it; I was doing what seemed to make sense in my character's situation. My DMs would sometimes be unprepared, would respond either by explicitly stating that I had gone off script or by more subtly trying to corral me back onto the rails, and some frustration would ensue; I would be frustrated because I felt like my freedom of character action, my ability to flex my imagination, was being curtailed.
My DMs were frustrated too, though the nature of the DM's frustration was not something I understood until later, when I started to DM my own games, and learned firsthand about the way combinatorial explosion rears its head in adventure and world design, about the difficulty of anticipating the imaginations of several intelligent, creative, self-selected-for-out-of-the-box-thinking people, and many other issues. As a DM, these problems are solvable with effort and practice, and I've gotten better over the almost 10 years that I've been a DM; I try rather hard to set up my world and adventures to allow for maximum freedom of choice and action (or at least the convincing illusion of such; much DMing comes down to sleight-of-hand).
Most of my DMing experience has been for an all-male group of experienced tabletop gamers, but recently I had the opportunity to run a semi-regular game for a group that was (shock and gasp!) majority-female. About half of the players, including two of the girls*, were entirely new to D&D and tabletop roleplaying in general; this was their very first game.
The games and my DMing met with satisfaction; all involved, as far as I can tell, enjoyed themselves, to the extent that after the game ended and we had to go our separate ways (the setting for this was a summer-long internship), a couple of the first-timers immediately went on to seek out regular D&D groups, which means that the D&D game I ran was what got them into this particular part of geekdom (that is, tabletop roleplaying gaming). All the players who expressed their satisfaction — including, notably, the first-timers — said that prominent among the things that contributed to their enjoyment of the game was the feeling of freedom, of options; the sense that their imagination and creativity in deciding what their characters could do, was not artificially constrained.
I took pride in this, because I've worked hard to develop the DMing skills that allow for such flexibility; my own early experiences are what prompted me to keep firmly in mind this particular failure mode of DMing (the inflexible script). I took pride also in being the vehicle through which intelligent women are introduced to geekdom (or, for those who were already geeks but in different ways, have their horizons expanded).
Of course, a certain awareness of women's experiences, such as those mentioned in this post, and of certain of the sorts of gender-related failures that plague geekdom, did also (I hope!) help in creating the sort of atmosphere in which female geeks/gamers could feel comfortable.
* "girls": college-age women, several years younger than me. No belittlement intended.
See "Better Disagreement". Nitpicking occupies level DH3-4: mere contradiction and responding to minor points, but not addressing the central point of the post.
(If you disagree with the rubric presented in "Better Disagreement", respond there.)
I think Better Disagreement uses a confrontational lens that isn't particularly suited to these situations. If the central point of the post is "these are real female experiences that you should be aware of," DH7 seems like a cruel joke at best: "This is what a real real female would experience, and even then we shouldn't be aware of it!"
It seems to me that helpful complaint comments will often come in two forms: error correction and alternative perspectives. If, say, an anecdote about EY in one of these posts spelled his name "Elezer," pointing out that they missed an "i" could be labeled as nit picking, but it doesn't seem like a helpful label: fix it, say thanks, and be happy that the post is better! If most of the comments are minor corrections, but the post is highly upvoted, remember that each of those upvotes is a short comment saying "I want to see more posts like this post." (If most of the comments are corrections and the post has low karma, the post has deeper problems that should get fixed.)
Alternative perspectives are trickier territory. Suppose that Anonymous Alice writes a story about how she was hurt that she said "good morning" to Name-changed Norman and Norman didn't respond; it made her feel unimportant and unappreciated. Bob comments that, if he were Norman and he didn't respond, it would have been because he was totally focused on what he was doing and didn't notice the greeting, not because it was a deliberate snub.
Both people like Bob and people like Alice have information they can acquire from this exchange- Bobs can learn that greetings are more important than they originally thought they were, and Alices can learn that greetings are less important than they originally thought they were. The next time someone doesn't greet Alice, she can tell herself "they look busy" instead of "I'm not important enough to warrant a greeting;" the next time Bob sees someone that he doesn't remember greeting that morning, he can greet them to make sure they don't feel unappreciated.
But the way that Alice and Bob write their comments, and read the other's comment, will have a big impact on how productive their perspective exchange is. It helps to acknowledge the other person's perspective, and cast yours as adding to theirs rather than contradicting theirs as much as possible. This is particularly tough when it comes to interpretations- if Alice says Norman was rude and Bob doesn't think that's the case, they can get bogged down by confusing the word "rude" for an empirical fact about reality that they can go out there and measure. Standard advice is to word things in terms of feelings: instead of "Norman snubbed me" which asserts intention, something like "I feel less important when Norman doesn't greet me" is much less contentious, and a discussion about how much Alice's importance is related to Norman's greetings is likely to be more productive by virtue of being more precise.
If a post has 39 "short comments saying "I want to see more posts like this post."" and 153 nitpicks, that says something about the community reaction. This is especially relevant since "but this detail is wrong" seems to be a common reaction to these kinds of issues on geek fora.
(Yes, not nearly all posts are nitpicks, and my meta-complaining doesn't contribute all that much signal either.)
It feels to me like we both have an empirical disagreement about whether or not this behavior is amplified when discussing "these kind of issues" and a normative disagreement about whether this behavior is constructive or destructive.
For any post, one should expect the number of corrections to be related to the number of things that need to be corrected, modulated by how interesting the post is. A post which three people read is likely to not get any corrections; a post which hundreds of people read is likely to get almost all of its errors noticed and flagged. Discussions about privilege tend to have wide interest, but as a category I haven't noticed them being significantly better than other posts, and so I would expect them to receive more corrections than posts of similar quality, because they're wider interest. It could be the case that the posts make people more defensive and thus more critical, but it's not clear to me that hypothesis is necessary.
In general, corrections seem constructive to me; it both improves the quality of the post and helps bring the author and audience closer together. It can come across as hostile, and it's often worth putting extra effort into critical comments to make them friendlier and more precise, but I'm curious to hear if you feel differently and if so, why you have that impression.
See "Support That Sounds Like Dissent".
It sounds like you are complaining that people are treating arguments as logical constructions that stand or fall based on their own merit, rather than as soldiers for a grand and noble cause which we must endorse lest we betray our own side.
If that's not what you mean, can you clarify your point better?
That it would be more epistemically and instrumentally productive not to throw up a cloud of nitpicking which closely resembles quite common attempts to avoid getting the point that there is actually a problem here.
I don't know what you expect when you say "actually engaging what has been said" - the post is a collection of interesting and well-written anecdotes, but it doesn't actually have a strong central point that is asking for a reaction.
It's not saying "you should change your behavior in such-and-such a way" or "doing such-and-such a thing is wrong and we should all condemn it" or asking for help or advice or an answer or even opinions ...
It is possible for people to criticize or comment on specific (possibly minor issues) while still learning from or getting the overall set of points made by something.
I daresay this is the least terrible discussion of gender we've ever had. Good job, LW!